Transforming Biology into a Technology to Solve Global Challenges

Synthetic biology uses basic biological building blocks to create fundamentally new cells, organisms, and biological functions not found in nature. This fast-growing discipline has the potential to advance many scientific fields by providing new approaches and tools to probe living systems and to revolutionize major industries by creating designer biological technologies. Once focused on small genetic circuits and model bacterial organisms, the scope of synthetic biology has expanded to more complex systems and a diverse array of organisms. Fueling these developments are transformative technological advancements in our ability to sequence, edit, and synthesize entire genomes. As a result, synthetic biology applications have now extended into many new spaces.

Thus, the field is at an exciting and critical juncture. Synthetic biology is poised to offer radical solutions to confront some of our most significant global challenges, including climate change, food shortages, the rise of antibiotic resistance, ageing populations, and cancer. However, this will only be possible through critical developments to transform this discipline into a truly predictive engineering science, including: establishing best practices for non-model organisms and mammalian cells, extending directed evolution techniques to entire pathways and systems, precision and large-scale genetic alterations in cells, orthogonalization, automation/design tools, systems modeling, and engineering principles for multicellularity and cell communities.

This Gordon Research Conference on Synthetic Biology and accompanying Gordon Research Seminar will provide a multidisciplinary forum to discuss progress and challenges in transforming biology into a predictive technology capable of addressing global challenges. In the spirit of Gordon Research Conferences, we will deliver an informal setting where scientists at all stages – graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, established researchers, and industry scientists - will engage as a community, foster new collaborations, and discuss key issues and questions - What is required to make synthetic biology a more industrialized and information-rich technology? How can we facilitate widespread adoption and integration of synthetic biology approaches and tools across the life sciences?